Perl 5 Grant Application: QA Hackathon Travel

We have received the following grant application from Ricardo Signes. Before we vote on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation that will last seven days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org.
**Name:** Ricardo Signes
**Project Title:** Perl QA Hackathon 2016
**Amount Requested:** $1200
**Synopsis:**
This grant will be used to pay for travel for Ricardo Signes to and from the Perl QA Hackathon held in Rugby, UK in Q1 2016.
**Benefits to Perl 5:**
I have attended six of the seven Perl QA Hackathons (Oslo, Birmingham, Amsterdam, Paris, Lancaster, and Lyon) and have, at each of them, been able to contribute several solid work days of very productive work to the infrastructure behind the CPAN and related tools. Specifically, I was one of the chief implementors of the new CPAN Testers platform (Metabase) and built the Fake CPAN system for testing CPAN tools, and several reusable software libraries that are used to power both Metabase and Fake CPAN. In 2012, I worked on refactoring PAUSE, adding tests and improving maintainability. PAUSE, the system which processes contributor uploads to the CPAN, manages CPAN contributor identity, and builds the CPAN indexes used by CPAN clients to locate libraries for installation.
In previous years, I also spent a significant amount of time working with other attendees on their contributions, and plan to do the same this year. This is one of the several reasons that attendance in person is incomparably superior to "virtual attendance."
**Deliverable Elements:**
The QA Hackathon does not have a set agenda, so promising specific work product from it up front seems unwise. I have detailed, above, the sort of work that I am almost certain to do, however. Further, I will provide a public, written report of my activities at the Hackathon.
I hope, in particular, to work on the web code of PAUSE and to discuss mechanisms for improving collaborative code review within the community of toolchain maintainers.
The hackathon takes place over the course of four days, with eight to ten hour workdays. I'll probably also be working on the travel and in the evenings.
Any software that I produce will be released under the Perl 5 standard license terms, or possibly even less restrictive terms.
**Applicant Biography:**
I have been building software in Perl professionally for about fifteen years. I am a frequent contributor of original software to the CPAN and a frequent contributor to, or maintainer of, other popular CPAN libraries. I am also a contributor to the core Perl 5 project, and its current project lead.
I have been the recipient of TPF grants five times before, all of which were successful.